


... In Bed

by marythefan (marylex)



Category: NSYNC, Popslash
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-24
Updated: 2003-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-06 20:25:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marylex/pseuds/marythefan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A decade of a developing relationship, as told through interpretive dance and fortune cookies.</p><p>Written for Liz for Don We Now Our Gay Apparel 2003.</p>
            </blockquote>





	... In Bed

_It is time to help a friend in need._

After the meeting with Lou, you and your mom go to lunch with Chris. Your mom insists on buying, and Chris looks equal parts uncomfortable and relieved by that, and you tell him about JC as you separate the remains of your moo goo gai pan with a fork, mushrooms in one neat pile, carrots in another. It's been a while since you had any decent Chinese food - it's not something you get a lot of in Millington, and you only developed a taste for it during the run of the Mouse Club, thanks to JC. He loves Chinese. You think that must be some kind of sign.

You snag a second fortune cookie on your way out. _You will have a bright future,_ it tells you.

_That's right,_ you think and go back to the hotel to call JC.

  
_The way to love anything is to realize it might be lost._

Sometimes you wonder if you chose him not because of any talent or drive - although he had both in abundance, you could already see that, could already tell with some kind of instinctive recognition of like calling to like - but because he was the one who came back to you.

Came back for you?

Whatever.

You always come back to each other. There are a few constants in your life: Music. Your mom. Trace. JC.

You had other friends with talent and drive, two or three, even, who could have slipped into the open spaces of a vocal group with only two members so far. You'd had plenty of co-workers with charisma, who knew what it took to make it. But when everyone else had scattered or flown - back to homes or on to other jobs or out to California looking for the big break - JC was the one who came back, came to Tennessee, to you.

He told you some of the stuff that happened out there, stuff that wore him down, and you both vowed that when you went back, you'd be on top of that world. You shared waxy white boxes of vegetables and noodles he'd picked up in Memphis, and he made you use chopsticks instead of a fork. You curled up on the sofa in the dark, later, watching the blue light of the TV flicker over the planes and hollows of his face as the two of you spun out your futures in fantastical word-pictures. He was laughing but fierce, too, and a little frightening underneath it all. You took his hand and made a vow that all your dreams would come true. You fell asleep like that, with his hand in yours, and he complained the next day about his backache from sleeping sitting up, leaning against the arm of the sofa.

That's what you mean when you say "brothers" - that deep-down connection that exists even from separate coasts or during months spent apart except for phone calls.

It's like he's always been there. Sometimes you pull out old MMC videotapes - his tapes, not yours, because there was no reason for you to be taping that far back - and you can't believe he had a before-you.

  
_A job well begun is only half done._

You always go back to each other, no matter what else is going on in the studio, no matter who else is producing - there's always that quick look at the toughest critic either of you knows, other than yourself. There's a reason you hit those notes recording "This I Promise You," and it's not Richard.

"Maybe we should take a break," Richard says, as you yank your cans off your ears in frustration, ripping out strands of hair in the process as the curls tangle around your fingers.

"Maybe we should get it right," C says, and you want to punch him. You also want to laugh at Lance's expression, half shocked and half admiring - he knows what a bitch JC can be in the studio, you all do, but to _Richard Marx,_ no less. Fuck wherever you go and whatever you do, apparently. C's not staying right anywhere, waiting for anybody.

And fuck if you're going to be left behind.

"Do it again," you say shortly, and you take that dull anger and frustration and force it all down, slam it all back out at him, pushing up and up with the purity and flexibility of well-tempered steel.

"That's it," Richard says, and now you've set yourself up to try and hit the damn notes every night in concert.

Or not.

"What if no one hears it?" you ask, later, wearily, not bothering to disguise the bleakness in your voice. You know JC is the one of them who will understand what this means to you. He won't dismiss the possibility that things could end up wrong and you could lose your name and your livelihood, the way Lance refuses to consider that it could happen. He won't try to joke you out of the mood the way Chris will, and he won't offer the wordless comfort you could find in Joey's hugs.

JC is the one who gets it, the other one who's had this taken away before.

"People will hear it," he tells you, knuckling your head with pressure light enough that it's more of a soothing massage through the cushion of your curls. "People will hear it. If we have to leak it on the Internet."

You hear just a bit of the intensity and simmering anger that's been driving him lately, the same kind of fierce obstinance that filled him when he came back to you from LA, and you blow out a breath and lean against him for a minute, trying to quiet him with your body.

He kisses the side of your head and tells you to eat something before you're nothing but skin and bones and hair, calling you ragamuffin and hunting down the sweet and sour sauce for you.

"Dude, that's not a fortune," he says later, scowling at his cookie. _"You have great patience?_ That's not a fortune. And I knew that already."

He throws the cookie at you when you laugh.

  
_Happiness is an attitude._

You know the fortunes aren't real, but there's a part of you that believes and that you can't quite shake. You know it's not real, but ... It's all in fun, but ...

You don't believe, but your bones do, despite your brain. You rationalize it by thinking to yourself - when you think about it at all - that you should listen when God or the universe or whoever tries to tell you something. If He does it with a fortune cookie, you still should listen. You got that fortune. It was meant for you.

C's the only one who understands, sort of. He thinks fortune cookies can give you some kind of guidance if you figure out the right way to apply them to your life, a sort of Zen tarot card that he's lucky enough to get complete with lo mein. It's not quite the way your bones feel, but it's something.

"So you're saying to _make_ the fortune about you?" Joey asks, poking around in the clutter on the hotel suite coffee table, looking for leftover spareribs while Lance gets another round of beers and JC holds forth about opening yourself to the cookie. "I thought J was the one who made everything be all about himself."

The pot is making JC even more rambling than usual, and Joey can't go unpunished, so you quit paying attention to C and come up off the floor, jumping on Joey's back and yanking on his hair. He wrestles you over his shoulder and pins you down, grinning as you huff. You only manage to get out about half the sounds you're trying to make under his comfortable weight.

"Neither of y'all does it right, anyway," Chris says, grabbing for JC's fortune, and you wonder idly when "y'all" started sounding natural coming from out of his mouth. _"Hold a true friend with both of your hands_ ..." Chris continues.

" ... In bed!" Lance choruses with Chris as he returns with the beer, and both of them collapse in giggles. You wouldn't have thought, at the beginning, that Lance could have made sounds that high. You don't think guys are really supposed to giggle, and you've developed a tendency to listen to yourself when you laugh, trying to gauge how you sound.

JC blinks before his face scrunches up in a grin.

"Well, that too," he tells Chris and promptly falls over to lay head-to-head with you, reaching out to cover your ears. "But don't tell the baby boy that! He's saving himself for Britney's marriage!"

Lance has managed to lure Joey away, waggling a cold bottle of beer at him, so you're free to bat at C's hands to dislodge them. You tilt your head back on the carpet to look at him looking at you, one corner of his mouth tilted up. He's still got the fingers of one hand buried in your hair, and it's not worth it to be indignant when you're full of food and beer and pot and those nimble fingers are rubbing your scalp.

You're falling asleep like that when he taps you on the head and tells you to go to bed.

  
_You are the guiding star of his existence._

You and C already had the built-in comfort zone - maybe it rippled outward from the pair of you to lap around the others and pull them in like some kind of tide. _Riptide,_ you think, and contemplate being pulled under with a rice-wine-enhanced philosophical calm. Phases of the moon and the push-pull of schedules and careers and the shifting balance of the times that two or three or four of you manage to get together … and you grab a pen out of your jacket pocket and scribble a note to yourself on a napkin, because you think it might make a song.

That's something you picked up from him, the bits and pieces jotted down on cocktail napkins and receipts and the insides of paperback book covers. Your notes had always been neatly printed, filed in a notebook - "Alphabetical order!" Chris chortled gleefully, once, clapping his hands in delight at your dorkitude - until C started pulling out sheets of paper and shifting them around. You'd smacked at his hands until he'd told you to shut up and look, and there was something about the flow of the words, the way they fit into the melody line you'd been plucking out on your guitar, something that fit. You'd nodded your head and sung a bit, and he'd sat down beside you at the tiny bus table and started shifting again.

The words are like puzzle pieces to him, and he can get lost in them, and that's when you provide some kind of structure and order. He can't take much of it without feeling straitjacketed, and you struggle with yourself, with how much you should push, because sometimes it comes out sounding stupid - come on, _"Space Cowboy?"_ \- but he lights up, electric, when he feels something fall into place for him. Sometimes he'll come to you, ask you to look at something. Half the time he won't take your advice, and on a good day he'll just look uncomfortable and ignore it instead of fighting you over it, and you wonder why he even asked, anyway.

But sometimes Chris staggers to the back of the bus, half-asleep, whining for the two of you to shut the fuck up, and you look up from a table scattered with paper and containers of cold fried rice from two stops ago, surprised at how late it is. Sometimes you get lost in his words, too, and you can see the patterns he's trying to make, and you can help shape them.

You're pretty sure most people will think of "Up Against The Wall" as JC's song, but he makes sure your name goes on it, too, in the liner notes.

  
_To live and not experience life is the same as never living._

He's always treated you as an equal, even when part of his role was to babysit you. He's listened to you and argued with you and nodded along with your ideas, without condescension. Most of the time.

You think, in return, you give him a safe space to play, an excuse. He and Chris - they're Lost Boys, looking for the Peter Pan who'll let them express that sense of childlike joy and wonder they both know is so precious and fragile. Joey gets it, too, and Lance, when Joey knocks him down or lifts him up off his feet.

You think you might be more like Lance, and you sit sometimes, talking quietly to him about publicity and press and business things and feeling like a grownup. You think Chris and C are good for you the way Joey's good for Lance. You need to be reminded sometimes to play, and so you get flicked in the head or chased through a parking lot.

He calls you "baby boy" when you need it, because he knows it pisses you off. He calls you "J," because. He started it and the others picked it up, but it doesn't mean quite the same thing from them. You asked him once, idly, as you stole his last won ton on a long stretch of highway in Kansas or maybe Missouri, why he started calling you "J." He smiled sweetly and sleepily and told you that it was because he was already "C" and you were like the other half of him. You knew he was being silly, even if it was heartfelt, but you felt your stomach hollow out and the back of your neck prickle, and you flushed and maybe trembled a little.

  
_Prepare yourself for a big change of events in your personal life._

You're not sure why Wade felt the oh-so-urgent need to confess, but after you've ordered him out of your sight, you can't stand to stay in your own house, your house, yours and hers. You go to JC because you have no place else to go. Your mom is in Tennessee and has to book a flight out, and all your tears and anger won't make the plane fly any faster, and there's nowhere else to go.

Well, there probably is, you could probably afford whatever hotel room you want, but there's no place else you _can_ go, and Chris won't hang up on his end until he hears you ring C's bell and the door opens.

  
_Beauty is in your heart - let it out, let it beat._

You hits you, suddenly, one day, how beautiful JC is. It's not like you've never noticed. You just never _noticed._

_Luminous,_ you think, when the light hits him just so. _Languorous,_ you try, and that's not really right, so you try a whole lot of other "L" words like _lithe_ and _lissome,_ and some of them fit but most of them don't, quite. And when you're done, you're still left staring at him, at the way he moves and twists his hips. You suck as a songwriter, you think, if you can't even come up with a way to describe one of your best friends.

It's not really about how he looks, anyway, although you think the longer hair is good - it softens his features, you heard one of the stylists say. And it's feathery and sleek at the same time against your fingertips when he lays his head in your lap and naps while you stroke your hands through it.

_Sleek,_ you think, and _sensual_ and other "S" words like _salacious_ and _sexy,_ and now you're getting into territory you're not sure you're ready for.

It's about the way he moves, the way he carries himself, like he's comfortable inside his own skin. He stretches, and you can tell he's enjoying the pull of his own muscles. You want to watch him touch himself, run his fingers over his own flesh.

_Limber,_ you think, and you feel your face go hot.

He's raw and open in those moments, his emotions shamelessly and unselfconsciously on display, and you're not sure how he does that, how he exposes himself that way and still manages to keep himself private, how he manages to shut it off against the demands of the world. If you opened yourself like that, let your own armor down, you're not sure you'd be able to get it back up that easily.

_Safe,_ you think, and _secure._

  
_Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well._

You haven't thought about how much the Compound dance studio resembled the Disney studio where you rehearsed back in the day - light wood and bright lights, but enclosed, small and safe, filled with familiar bodies. You haven't thought much about it until you're rehearsing for the VMAs, the sounds of your first single bouncing high off a raised ceiling as you dance in that large open space, trendy brick wall reminding you of warehouse heat and starting over.

You turn and the corner of your eye is empty, and you can feel the absence around you, and you're abruptly melancholy.

There's so much space, and this time there's no one else there, and you have to fill it up yourself.

  
_The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention._

The first you know of Nick is when he bursts through the dressing room door at one of the Jingle Balls, grabbing JC and kissing as he whirls, spinning them around a common center until they're both breathless and giggling and hanging on to each other. Nick doesn't even notice you until JC collapses back against one of the makeup counters, and then he ducks his head abashedly and scrubs at the hair over one of his ears as he tells you "Hey."

C and Carter? When did that happen? You feel lost, fumbling, but you plaster on a smile and pull yourself together, performance-ready, responding in kind and thrusting out a fist for him to bump.

"Get back over here, man," JC drawls, tugging Nick backward and glomming on to him from behind like some kind of ... of spider monkey, you think, randomly. C's got his chin hooked over Nick's shoulder, looking at you, and you laugh and nod to tell him that everything's cool.

It should be, you think to yourself, as you watch them for the rest of the evening. They fit together in some way, both living in the moment.

"Lost-weekend type of thing," Chris says, when you ask him when the hell it happened. He's spooning up plain rice with duck sauce, and you laugh as he spews grains. "They hooked up after the Billboards, I think."

"That's more than a weekend," you point out, and he shrugs.

"They're just having fun."

He seems sure, and he also seems to be right - when it's just you and Nick at the last appearance, for KIIS in LA, JC suddenly remembers, before you get off your cel with him, to say, "Oh, and tell Nick I said 'Hi.' "

"That's cool, man. Tell him 'Hi back,' next time you see him," is Nick's casual response.

So everything should be cool, but you can't stop thinking about what they looked like together, what they would look like _together,_ can't stop thinking about what JC's hands would look like buried in Nick's silky hair with Nick on his knees, what JC's long legs would look like wrapped around Nick's waist, what JC's face would look like from over Nick's broad shoulders while Nick thrust into him.

That night is the first time you allow yourself to think about JC while you touch yourself.

  
_Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst._

The first time you kiss him, you're drunk, and he tastes like plum sauce and saffron, and you're terrified of yourself. You can hear his voice in your head, telling you about his own dawning self-awareness, how he'd been so dumb he thought he was just turned on by the idea of Keri when he thought about her and Tony together.

He doesn't laugh, thank God, the way he'd done the first time he talked to you after that stupid interview when they'd asked you about your bandmates and sex and you'd panicked, locked down, because the first thing it made you think of was the long curve of JC's back as he bent over to untie his shoes after stripping off his shirt after a rehearsal, and you blurted out something about never seeing anybody's dick. That was the right answer, right?

Chris whapped you in the back of the head the next time he saw you, and Lance snorted at you over the phone, and Joey shook his head sadly when you visited him in New York, telling you "Locker rooms" in the tone of voice that said you were the stupidest person on the face of the earth. JC just giggled for five minutes straight, the kind of helpless laughter that completely overcomes him sometimes, and when you got up from the table to leave the restaurant in a huff, he smacked you on the ass as you walked away.

"See if I buy you any more nekkid woman birthday cakes," you hissed at him under your breath, so no one would hear, but it's not like you could stay indignant. You'd sounded like a tool, and it kept happening. Every time the topic of *NSYNC and sex came up, you'd think about the curve of his body as he danced or the look on his face when he sang or the way he felt snugged up against your back during soundcheck, and you could feel your face heating and you couldn't let anyone know.

So thank God, he doesn't laugh when you kiss him, because you're holding it together with all the skill of a decade of showmanship, a decade he's been there for, but you can feel yourself shaking. If he makes a wrong move, you're sure you'll shatter into a million sharp, glittering, ruined, pretty pieces. You don't know if you'd ever be able to put yourself back together.

But he doesn't laugh. He kisses you back, fingers light on your face, taste of fruit and spice as the tip of his tongue meets yours, and it's like a bolt of electricity shot straight up your spine. Your hands clench involuntarily in the fabric of his shirt.

"Oh, sweetheart," he murmurs against your lips, and then he pulls back and looks at you, fingers still cupping your cheek. "Is this what you really want? You should think about it, because you need to be sure."

He silences your protests and puts you to bed and curls up around you, and you fall asleep with his breath on the back of your neck, his arms tight around your waist. You feel safe until the morning, when you leave before he wakes up.

  
_Time makes one wise. Ask advice from someone older than you._

You go back to your tour and your girlfriend and your life, but you can't stop thinking about him, and you're looking at other men in a whole new way.

You call him and talk about performances and music and your tour and his work in the studio. Just before you hang up, he tells you he loves you and you say it back, but it's nothing the two of you haven't said before, and you're not sure what he means anymore, from the opposite coast.

You call Chris and tell him that you don't know who you are anymore, and he tells you that you're the same guy you've always been.

You tell your mom you think you're in love with a guy, and she hugs you tight, silent, but you know she'll support you no matter what, because she's your mom.

You talk to Trace, sprawled head to head across a hotel room bed, cheap takeout containers half-full of hot and sour soup and egg foo yung on the end table, and he tells you that you can be whoever you want to be.

You call JC, and you talk about performances and music and your tour and his work in the studio. Just before you hang up, he tells you he loves you and you say it back.

  
_Try something new._

"I was scorched, I was torched, I was knocked off my porch!" you tell him, and he laughs.

He's rock-star JC today, hair wild and shirt unlaced, and it looks good on him, it sounds good on him. You've been listening to some of the stuff he's put together for his album, and you can hear him in all of it - even if it's all over the map, even if the promo guys don't seem to know what to do with it, even if they can't seem to settle on a drop date. You think they might be going back and forth over which tracks are going on the album, and you know he'll get what he wants. You're surprised that, when he told them to fuck off and leave him alone for a couple of months if they wanted an album, he hadn't used those actual words. It's not that JC doesn't get the game, you think, it's just that he refuses to play, an attitude that came in handy for your good-cop, bad-cop routine during the negotiations with the suits over Celebrity. It's one more reason you make such a good team.

He raps you on the knuckles with one of his chopsticks.

"Trade me," he says, holding out his fortune. You look at him and you can feel your face falling into lines of incredulity. C knows you don't trade fortunes. You can't just go trading destinies.

You know it's stupid on some level, this attachment to a piece of paper you pulled out of a cookie, but this is how you've always done things, and JC has always let you, until now.

"What ... hey!" He's made a feint and a grab, and he's standing beside the table, holding your fortune in his hand.

"Give me your hand," he says, and you stick it out impatiently, palm up, ready for him to stop playing this stupid game. But he doesn't give you back your slip of paper, your fortune. He puts his own folded strip into your palm, closing your fingers over it and holding your fist in his hands. His fingers are warm and strong and they tighten just slightly on yours as he looks down at you, studying your face for ... something, and then he's loping away toward the door of the restaurant.

You scowl to yourself and tighten your fist on the crumpled paper in your hand. You're tempted to drop it in your tiny teacup, but you smooth it out instead, running your fingertips across the creases before you allow yourself to focus on the words.

  
_He who hesitates is lost._

He can't have beat you back to his place by more than five minutes, but the rock star is gone and it's just C who answers the bell, barefoot and beautiful, smiling as he opens the door. You're hardly inside before you're kissing him, and his fingers are buried in your hair, tugging on the curls that have barely grown back out.

"Hi," you whisper, when you pull apart to breathe, resting your forehead against his.

"Hey, sweetheart," he says, fingertips stroking your neck and making you shiver. His words are a warm breath against your lips. "Hey. Open up."

You open your eyes and he kisses you again before taking your hand and leading you upstairs.

_Lean,_ you think as you watch him watching you while he undresses, _long_ and _lean_ and _lascivious_ and a couple of other "L" words too, but those words are nothing new for you and him.

_Seductive,_ you think, as he pulls off your shirt, and _sinuous,_ as he wraps himself around you, and _skin._

You pull your fingers down his bare back, and he stretches, presses against you and grins, shoving you back onto the bed. Your pants have disappeared somewhere, and he's crawling, fucking prowling up the bed on his hands and knees to kneel between your thighs, running his palms up the long muscles in your legs that tense under his touch.

"You know how this part works, right?" he says, before he ducks his head, and you're arching up into wet heat, thighs spreading, hands clenched in the sheets, and you can feel his fingers pressing in and his throat opening wider and you slide deeper and fall apart.

When he kisses you, after, tongue slicking into your mouth, you can taste yourself and him in a strange new combination. He's sprawled on top of you, long legs tangled with yours, more reassuringly solid than he looks. He thrusts against your hip, and you're in unfamiliar territory now. You feel lost, fumbling, so you pull yourself together and reach down, but he grabs your wrist.

You're still confused and you worry your bottom lip between your teeth until he laughs and leans down to kiss you again, a slow slide of lips.

"Open up," he whispers. "Open up."

He presses your hand to his chest, lacing his fingers over yours, pulling them down the planes of his body, slow slide of flesh, and he makes a high, sharp noise into your mouth as you lift one knee, brushing the inside of your thigh against his flank. You're sure your fingers are clumsy as they explore his body, but his hips are twisting against you, his breath more frantic, and he's pushing you down into the mattress with every thrust. He doesn't resist now when you wrap your hand around him, and you feel the sharp sting of teeth in your shoulder as he tenses, muscles stretched and straining.

He keeps shuddering against you, hips moving in frantic little twists of aftershock, and you press full-length against him, trying to reassure him with your body.

Later, he curls up behind you, his breath on the back of your neck, his arms tight around your waist. He presses a kiss behind your ear, and you take his hand and think about how all your dreams have come true. You fall asleep like that, with his hand in yours.

  
_You will have an exciting addition to your life by being the warm person you are ... in bed._


End file.
